Reach Out and Read: Transforming Gift Reporting With Apsona and Managed Services

Reach Out and Read (Reach Out) is a nonprofit organization that gives young children a foundation for success by incorporating books into pediatric care and encouraging families to read aloud together. It is the only national pediatric literacy model endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and annually serves 4.4 million children and families across every state in the country. In deep partnership with a national network of clinicians, Reach Out and Read leverages the near-universal reach of the pediatric well-child visit, using children’s books and shared reading to support parents and caregivers in fostering early literacy and healthy relationships with their infants and young children.

Reach Out and Read is one of Cloud for Good’s longtime Managed Services customers, having begun their partnership with Cloud for Good in 2015. In addition to Managed Services support, Cloud for Good has also performed multiple projects and burst engagements with Reach Out and Read, with one of the most recent and impactful burst engagement projects being the implementation of General Accounting Units (GAUs) and an Apsona-built tool to view and understand GAUs with Salesforce.

The Opportunity and Challenge

Reach Out and Read Affiliates are statewide and regional offices connected with the National Center. Reach Out and Read Affiliates work directly with Reach Out and Read program sites to ensure the effective implementation and quality of the Reach Out and Read model. When funding is received at Reach Out and Read, it often needs to be disbursed among the National Center and Affiliates. Prior to doing this work with Cloud for Good, Reach Out and Read Staff would need to enter details of the disbursement, including how much and where funds were being allocated, into a text field on Salesforce or an offline spreadsheet. This process, however, made reporting on grant recipients cumbersome.

“It was frustrating for us because our reports and dashboards were often inaccurate because we couldn’t report in the way we needed to,” explained Brenna Melo, Director of Development Operations for Reach Out and Read.

The Solution and Results

This need for more accurate reporting led Reach Out and Read to seek a better solution for tracking, managing, and reporting on split gifts, and they leaned in on their Managed Services engagement with Cloud for Good.

Reach Out and Read realized an opportunity to use Salesforce to automate a process that was previously done manually in Excel—creating a Grant Summary Sheet, a one-page overview of a grant. To aid in the solution, Cloud for Good leveraged Apsona’s Document and Button Merge tools, creating a merge button on each Opportunity record that gathers fields from the record, including the newly created GAUs, and inserting them into an Excel sheet. This involved creating an Excel template with Pivot Tables and merge fields in order to capture data enabled by Apsona’s Document Merge capabilities with reports and a Document Merge Lightning Web Component.

As a result of the combination of GAUs and the Grant Summary Sheet Button, Reach Out and Read can to accurately report on and visualize gifts.

“This solution is life-changing and has provided so much value,” said Melo. “We can now see what portion of a gift each of our affiliates receives. We can also see pipeline items on Opportunities within Salesforce and staff can see what those are in the gift process. The addition of the Grant Summary Sheet Button has made an even bigger impact by replacing a manual process with an automated one.”

In fact, the Grant Summary Sheet solution has been so impactful and successful for Reach Out and Read that the organization decided to extend the necessary Apsona capabilities to all its Salesforce users!

“We are delighted to know we’ve been a strong partner,” said President of Apsona Justin Barss on Reach Out and Read’s success. “More than two-thirds of our customers are nonprofits and social impact organizations and we love the impact that Reach Out drives and their organization.”

When asked about Apsona’s involvement in Reach Out and Read’s solution, Barss expressed what a positive and meaningful experience and opportunity it was to drive enhanced efficiency and effectiveness for their Salesforce users. “We think Apsona’s greatest value is that it helps organizations make decisions better and use their data to make decisions,” shared Barss. “We want Reach Out and Read to experience value out of their Salesforce org. So with Cloud for Good’s abilities and our Document and Button Merge features … putting it together delivers value at the point of need for Reach Out’s Salesforce users. Now, they can push a button, it pops out data, and they now have the data they need to talk to a grant officer and to the donor.”

Empowered for Future Vision by Cloud for Good

“Cloud for Good has really helped us to build a tremendous system,” shared Melo. “Salesforce is awesome, but it does often need a lot of customization. Cloud for Good has been a partner with us for so long and they’ve helped us build up our Salesforce and really get our feet under us.”

Melo also noted how Cloud for Good’s Managed Services support was pivotal to them amid funding transitions and changes. “Reach Out and Read has had many transitions and much growth over the years. So, to be successful, we really had to look at our systems and database and make sure they worked. Cloud for Good has been a really important partner to us in steering us through that transition and so many changes, and they’ve helped us know and take advantage of what’s new with Salesforce.”

Barss echoed Melo’s sentiments on partnering with Cloud for Good. “We have the utmost respect for Tal Frankfurt (Cloud for Good’s CEO and Founder) and for the whole [Cloud for Good] team,” shared Barss. “We’re enthused that Apsona is a valued partner to Cloud for Good, and they are valued partners to us.”

To learn more about Reach Out and Read and its work, visit www.reachoutandread.org.